presentations day 3

Day the third and final of individual, whole school presentations for the Salt arc!

Zada gave us all an informational talk on the influence that salt has on nerves and how that idea informed her research project on synesthesia. She also played song samples and showed us the paintings she’d done based on colors she sees when listening to music.

Mason described the process of building a lemonade cart in the workshop and the difficulties he faced. He also told us about serving salted lemonade and took an impromptu poll of which people preferred lemonade with a little bit of salt versus a lot of salt.

Isaac told us about his process in making his three-minute video of chefs preparing food in professional kitchens. He explained that he had a lot of setbacks, but we were all impressed at the film and his freestyle jazz drumming that he did on the cork floor while we watched the film.

Meg displayed her research on the effect of salt on cows and brine shrimp and told us how she had discovered that cows are much more intelligent than we think. She asked a series of questions based on her research and rewarded right answers with a cookie.

Logan talked about his knowledge of fishing and proudly displayed the fishing rod he made during the expression phase. He did a demonstration of threading eyelets onto the rod with a device called a jig.

Henry and Max, whose restaurant project happened Friday (pictures forthcoming!), told us about the struggles they faced during the idea and implementation process, as well as how successful they were on the big day.

Levi read us his research on piranhas from South America and admitted that he had had assumptions about the bloodthirsty fish before he did the research and debunked some myths: they don’t live in seawater and they’re very shy!

Clementine presented her Field Guide to Salt, her hand-bound and handmade book on different kinds of salts from all around the world. Her particular favorite was the ginger salt from Thailand, which uses the juice from ginger roots to make the spicy flavor.

Nicky brought us over to the Phantoms’ bands space and showed us the pulley system he made that is strong enough for one person to lift 75 pounds of salt. He explained the physics of splitting up the weight of the heavy object between several pulleys to make lifting easier.

Theo, planet master, filled our bellies with pizza that he had meticulously put together as representations of planets and moons from all over the Solar System. Each pizza had flavors that mirrored its planet’s attributes: the Sun pizza had multicolored bell peppers, the Mars pizza was red and peppery hot. Yum!

Tomorrow night concludes the Exposition phase of the Salt arc in an evening open house where the students will set up their projects like museum displays and will be on hand to answer questions in more depth and admire their peers’ work!